Using Cell Phones in Education

"Nearly three out of four Americans send text messages on the phone and among those who do, 31 percent prefer texting to talking, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center," reported in September 2011 from the Pew Research Center. After reading the blog, From Toys to Tools: Cells Phones in Learning, I began exploring the resources to see which ones I found most reliable and beneficial for classroom teachers. After thorough investigation, these are the three sites I found to be the most useful:

Kikutext is all about parent engagement. Here's what Kikutext has to say about their program, "We truly believe that an increase in parent engagement will mean an increase in student achievement. Every part of our application is designed to help you easily and quickly communicate with parents more regularly."

Here's how we do it...

Real Two-Way Communication: Communication is never a one-way street. Parents can easily reply to your messages allowing real, two-way engagement.
Status Reports: Efficiency is the name of the game. With our easy and customizable status report feature, you can send out quick updates to all of your students' parents on a regular basis.
Full Conversations and History Archive: We never lose records. Instantly review your past conversations with parents.
Beyond Blasts: You're not limited to blasts here! Communicate information to one parent, one classes' parents, or all of your classes' parents - you choose.
Safe: We give you a proxy phone number so that personal contact information is never exchanged.
Send Later (coming very soon): This feature is in the works! Program reminders to be sent out to parents at a later date.

Remind101 provides an easy way to contact your students/parents via text messages.The great part is that no phone numbers are revealed from either party. Once a teacher creates an account then students/parents can join teacher created groups via text messaging or email.Teachers can add up to 10 different classess/groups to communicate with and schedule future messages. CON: Students/parents can NOT reply to messages.

Watch the video to learn more about Remind 101:

 

Joopz is a web-based text messaging service that enables "web texting" -- two-way communications from the Web to any mobile phone in the U.S. and Canada... and back. Features in Joobz include: Two-way web texting, Group messaging, Text reminders, and Scheduled messages.
CONS: Free only lets you send 50 messages a month. For unlimited messages the cost is $2.95 month or $19.95 year.

Sources:  All information was pulled from Kikutext.com, Remind101.com, Joopz.com